White Christmas

White Christmas in Texas. Yes, really I’m not lying. It really happened. It’s only happened a couple of times in my 24 years of living in Fort Worth.

There’s something so magical about it. I mean it’s that whole Norman Rockwell thing again.

On Christmas Eve, we went to our Christmas Eve candlelight service.

 This year was a bit more challenging keeping Miss Mc Fuss-a-lot quiet during the service, but the bonus was she updated all of Justin’s phone apps in the process of her entertainment. She had a small part in the service and waved to everyone so it was hard for anyone to stay mad at that cuteness.

It’s a yearly tradition to go to my parents’ house where they make my favorite meal of the year…a homemade Mexican feast with warm tamales. Yum! I eat myself silly every Christmas Eve.

On the way home we always are on the lookout for Santa and the reindeer. Here’s a little bit of our conversation:

Me: Oh! I think I see Rudolph! I see a right light!

Campbell: I see it!

Nolan: Nope that’s just a tower.

Me: Maybe Santa hasn’t made it here yet.

Campbell: Yeah, he’s in Mexico. I see a red light!!!!

Nolan: No, that’s just another tower.

Justin: Nolan, you don’t know you can’t see that far away.

Nolan: I’m not trying to be a genius!

I belly laughed over that one. I just love love love this age for our kids and the things they say. Not so much the fighting and tantrums but they say some crazy cute stuff.

We let the kids open one present Christmas Eve and it's always new jammies. Preparing for Santa is not an easy task after such a full day but we can't the big man in the red suit down.

Cookies: check
Milk: check
reindeer food: check

 Christmas Eve brought a pretty nasty storm so we ended up with two boys in bed with us. That was fun covering up their eyes at 3 a.m. so they wouldn’t see their Christmas gifts. Presents were loved by all and my sweet niece, Madison, spent the night with us so it made it even more special.

And that’s my girl, already liking clothes at the ripe old age of 15 months.

We bundled the kids and went outside to play in the snow. Landry and I only could stand it for about 10 minutes because it was crazy cold. Poor Landry didn’t have any gloves so we resorted to socks on her hands. Hey, it’s better than nothing.

My boys on the other hands played outside til their cheeks were red and their fingers were purple from snowballs. I finally had to be the party pooper and tell them that they had to come in because I didn’t want them getting sick.

The next day we left for Kentucky. The same day that Arkansas got 12-13 inches of snow…as in a blizzard. Yeah, we drove through that.

With 3 kids.

For 16 hours.

Another memory for the books.

Twas the night before Christmas...

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not one person was out of their jammies until 4:00 p.m. Don't mistake that for laziness. We made time for a little bit of snugglin' but we definitely had a full agenda on Christmas Eve.

First on the list, make cookies for Santa. Lesson learned a few years ago to get that out of the way on Christmas Eve...maybe one year I can even get it done earlier. My fear is that if I make them too early, we'll eat them and poor Santa won't have any!

 

Landry was the happiest spectator there ever was. I can't wait for her to join in on the fun.

Note to self, put tape over all the holes of the sprinkle container except ONE! That is plenty! Those were the crunchiest iced cookies I've ever tasted. After hours in the kitchen preparing for Christmas dinner at our house and Christmas Eve at my mom's we finally showered and got out of our pajamas.

Next up, Christmas Eve service at church. It's ain't Christmas Eve without it.

 

Multiple times this Christmas I think back to last year and we weren't even pregnant and here we are with this adorable, beautiful baby girl and I'm amazed again at how blessed we are and how much our lives have changed in just one year. God is so good. Can I get an AMEN?

I'm a sucker for candlelight services. I'm the one that is choking back tears every year as we sing "Silent Night." Throw in my children singing with candles in their small hands, with the candle glow on their faces while I'm holding and staring at my beautiful baby girl, and I'm a blubbering idiot.

We usually get a picture in front of the tree at church, but our children Campbell was fading fast so we settled for the advent wreath. Aaaand this is the best we got.

 

 At this point, all I've eaten all day was breakfast and the few things I snacked on while cooking in the kitchen. My stomach was growling that embarrassing growl it does in church when you can only laugh because it's so loud. 

Next up, my parent's house for homemade Mexican feast....tamales, enchiladas, beans, rice. Let's just say that I made up for being so starving and won't divulge how glutinous I was. It's too shameful.

 

For the past two years, Nolan has dressed up like an elf. He's finally grown out of his 3T shorts...skinny bean pole. So this was the closest he resembled an elf this year. 

 

And I couldn't help but join in too. My dad sets up a Polar Express train under the tree and the boys literally sit and stare at it forever. They toot the horn and I just cross my fingers that they don't get that train off the track.

As an extra special treat, my grandparents came down from Amarillo and we got to spend the most time with them that we have in years. I loved that Great Grams got some time with Landry and Landry was so happy to be held and snuggled by everyone.

We finally made it home and my children were still going strong even though it was 10:00 at night!
I was so grateful to have happy children. Happy children = happy mama!

We let our kids open one present on Christmas Eve and it's always a new pair of jammies. This year I actually found some that matched! That's hard to do now that Nolan is in big boy size!

Landry even got a new pair of Christmas jammies and so did Justin. Could this picture be any sweeter? I'm running out of room on my walls because I have so many favorites now!

Once we had everyone in their jammies, we made a mad dash to get cookies, milk and reindeer food out. Notice how Campbell took the opportunity to sneak in my sprinkles before putting them on Santa's plate.

Final bedtime for the boys? 10:30.  Then we had to make sure they were really asleep before getting everything out. We had everything set out and then discovered at midnight we had another bag in the closet that hadn't been wrapped yet. 

Lovely. 

Thank goodness for gift bags and stockings. The rest of the things were thrown into the Santa pile (Santa doesn't wrap in our house). 

My favorite part of the night (besides the candlelight service, of course) was on our way home from my parents house, we were on the lookout for Santa and Rudolph. I saw a red blinking light in the sky and did my best Academy Award winning acting about it being Rudolph. The boys were eating it up, going nuts and even talking about how they could see it moving. Guess they were just falling for the illusion of our car moving. 

Little did I know, that blinking light was getting closer and closer as we traveled. As we got closer, Nolan says, "Hey, that's just a tower!" RATS! Campbell starts somehow thinking that Nolan tricked him so he says, "NOWAN (as he lovingly calls him), STOP tricking me!" It was such a funny moment and I just loved how magical these years are. 

I don't think I've ever been so exhausted after Christmas as this year but again...Christmas didn't disappoint. I'll catch up later on sleep....someday long from now. But these memories? They're what feeds my soul.

More Christmas coming soon!

Packing it in

Packing the memories, that is. Anyone else feel like you were non-stop with Christmas events? There was some serious jam packed memory making these past two weeks. Justin's parents and sister came in from Kentucky. Now that they're retired it was nice change of pace and have a Texas Christmas. It felt so weird not packing, traveling, and unpacking during the holiday season. Although I was sad to miss a white Kentucky Christmas, it really was wonderful having a Christmas at home.

Since we knew that Santa wanted sugar cookies, we put Gram on that project Christmas Eve. We don't want to disappoint the man in the red suit after all. I was still worn out from our last batch of cookies.



Campbell hasn't quite understood the concept of making one impression with the cookie cutters. He usually made it with about 8-10 cuts into the dough.

Nolan loved it...every.single.lick



Christmas Eve ain't Christmas Eve without the candlelight service at church. Put a candle in my hand, sing some Silent Night and you might as well call me a blubbering idiot.



And for the first time since our wedding over eight years ago, both of our parents had dinner at my parents' house after church. I'm talking homemade-enchiladas-beans-rice-and-tamales-lick-your-plate style. One of my proudest moments to be Hispanic is when my mom can rock one of her homemade meals. Feliz Navidad, baby!


My parents have maybe two square feet of wall space that isn't covered with Christmas decorations. In fact, one year my parents' tree had so many decorations on it that it fell over. As if that wasn't funny enough, my dad held the tree for three hours for my mom to come home to help him.

 So you can imagine that my children think that going to Grandma and Granddad's house is the same as going through the enchanted candy cane forest by the North Pole. My dad's a giant kid when it comes to Christmas and completely lives vicariously through the boys with his love for trains...Polar Express style.

Since everyone was all dressed up when we finally made it home, we had to get a family pic. This is what we got...lovely.

After some laughing (and threatening) we finally did a couple of decent shots.

 

We had the boys open their staple Christmas Eve present that's always jammies. At this point, we're creeping past 10:00 and realizing that Santa still has a lot to do to get ready for the next morning. So the next five minutes included throwing on jammies, slapping some cookies on a plate, and Justin chunking reindeer food in the yard as the boys watched. Not exactly as low key as our Christmas Eve last year since we were snowed in.

And this is just Christmas Eve people. Told ya it was jam packed.

Winter Wonderland

Wow, I can't believe how fast those two weeks went by during break. You're going to be so sick of all my Christmas posts but I'm finally just getting to them. There was a lot that just happened in the past two weeks.

On Christmas Eve, Justin had to work in the morning so the boys and I just hung out at the house and stayed all warm and snuggly. We were so excited to see the snow...and so perfectly timed with Christmas. We got our cookies out to make for Santa and blared Christmas music on TV. Nolan noticed that every song they played seemed to be a song about it snowing...how perfect! It was like you could bottle up the happiness in the house. Nolan couldn't stop watching it out the window. I think he was amazed that snow could blow sideways!

We traditionally go to our Christmas Eve service and then head to my parents' house for a homemade Mexican dinner...tamales, enchiladas, rice, beans. I even ate a very light lunch knowing the damage I was going to do later that night. So we got everyone ready in their Christmas Eve best and were about to head out when we got a call that they canceled the Christmas Eve service. Oh well but we still were planning on going to my mom's for dinner but then decided to turn on the news to make sure how the weather was. That's when we saw there were almost 150 wrecks in DFW and it was taking people hours to get anywhere. Painstakingly we decided to skip my mom's and save that for Christmas day. Since we were leaving town the next day I really had the bare minimum groceries in the house. So I scrounge up this random meal of green beans, macaroni, and corn, and turkey hot dogs. Yummm, right? Not exactly, well maybe for a bachelor. And especially when your stomach was preparing for the tamale feast and then having to eat that instead.

So since we were all dressed with no place to go, I thought let's go outside and take some pictures. It was seriously like a blizzard. Campbell was all for it but Nolan was a little freaked that he couldn't even open his eyes. We had 2 ft. snow drifts in our yard. We stayed outside maybe 5 minutes before we had to head back inside again. Justin, being the Kentucky boy that he is, stayed outside and we watched him out the window play in the snow like a little boy. Nolan kept screaming, "Daddy, make a snowman! Make a snowman!" He was more for watching than helping.

We started a new tradition of letting the boys open one present each on Christmas Eve...pajamas. I'm sure they'll be so thrilled every year to open those up. That way everyone has new jammies Christmas morning. The cookies were made, the milk was poured for Santa, and off to bed we went.

Although it felt so weird staying home for Christmas Eve, it was so nice to have that time as a family and watch the snow come down. It just made my heart so warm. Even the hot dogs couldn't have ruined that moment.

making cookies during the day for Santa later that night...

couldn't stop watching that snow blow!
Outside during our blizzard wonderland
Campbell's thinking, "What is this white stuff?"
Don't worry we had on lots of layers
If all of the snowflakes were candy bars and milkshakes...

Opening up their Christmas Eve presents
showing off our new jammies
Wonder how long they'll let me get them matching jammies

getting ready for Santa
nice cold glass of milk for the man in the red suit